4000 Sundays: When Work Worries Ate the Weekend
Phone use creates Sunday Scaries. Who knew?
Since I started winning the battle against my phone, my Sunday Scaries have largely gone away. It goes without saying - it’s a huge prize. That’s a whole day back with the family that was previously lost to a muddy fog of terror.
That sounds weird doesn’t it. Why would taking a daily, silent intentional break from the phone lead to that?
But it shouldn’t be surprising.
There’s now a mountain of scientific evidence that phone use lowers your mood 24/7. So if you cut use and if your mood is going to improve generally, that’s got to manifest somehow right? Stands to reason Sundays would feel a lot better.
But during the week on the commute, the mood on Sunday feels a million miles away. So I can completely understand people going crazy for it on their phones. It all feels like a freebie.
But after two months of Phone Free Commuting, it gets a little dystopian to be constantly surrounded by all the swiping and refreshing.
It’s nearly Spring in London. The other morning was properly cheery weather.
As we passed Earlsfield, we whizzed past rows of Victorian terraces getting ready for their day. The train was going quickly, but every now and then there was a flash into a morning domestic scene, a hurried kitchen here, a frantic hall there. We were so fast, I only caught two people clearly.
I kid you not, both the people I saw were on their phones.
Four thousand Sundays
You get four thousand Sundays in an average lifespan. I’ve had around half of them (probably don’t need to say that; I think we can all detect there’s something mid-life going on here).
For a decent proportion of the two thousand, my main preoccupations were
thinking through a work worry
trying to work out how not to think through a work worry
During the week, evenings always felt like a shadow thrown by work. I wrote about that experience here - let me know if you find it relatable.
Then, when it came to Friday evening, that didn’t just persist - it worsened. Suddenly everything I failed to do in work during the week returned as a crowd of ghosts.
Unable to escape their haunting, I lived with what my wife and I called “Work Head”. As in “I’ll pick up that crying baby in a second, I still have Work Head. I need to draft an imaginary email in my head, so therefore can’t really concentrate on what’s going on. Or what you’re saying about the crying baby.”
These worries would persist through Saturday morning and then - for some reason - they would vanish.
Real Weekend would begin at around 3pm on Saturday afternoon. Real Weekend was delicate though. First rule of Real Weekend: you can’t notice that you aren’t worried about work, or it’ll all suddenly flood back.
Sunday mornings were mostly good too. We use the posh coffee, we never got papers but we could have done.
But at a certain point, Real Weekend was over. The colour would drain out of things. There was an imperceptible heaviness. At any given moment you could tell it was Sunday. All the flowers in the garden centre looked grim.
Sunday nights? Well, we all know there’s nothing good to be had there.
Solving Sunday Scaries
Clouds of dread aside, weekend worries were about my mind endlessly trying to tackle problems without my permission.
Some problems were ridiculous, others were very real, but the moment chosen to think them through was always wildly inappropriate.
Dilemma: Should I have used “All My Very Best” at the end of that email?
Timing: While waiting for my turn in a game of Uno with the kids.
Dilemma: Should I now draft a second email to cover that up? And what other emails can I draft right now? Can I get the wording right on all of them?
Timing: Late Friday night, failing to get to sleep.
Dilemma: Will the AI revolution trigger catastrophic job losses in the media industry? (With particular reference to people who sign off emails inappropriately and are therefore unemployable.)
Timing: A garden centre toilet visit.
I tried everything to stop this happening, but nothing worked.
But meanwhile, in an unrelated area of my life, I was making some progress. At a certain point I realised that meditation (or mental training, if you prefer) would help cut my phone use.
And then one Sunday, the Sunday Scaries just didn’t descend. It was so odd. I didn’t connect it. It was only when three Sundays in a row had happened - combined with a parallel end to the Friday Fog - that I started to figure out what was going on.
How did that happen?
I will write in another post about whether it was the cut in phone use or the meditation that did for Sunday Scaries - or whether it even matters. It’s something to do with the brain’s Default Mode Network. You’re going to love it.
But it all makes sense with a little imagination. The phone is all about mental activity in an inappropriate context. I’m brushing my teeth - let’s brush up on geopolitics at the same time. The phone shatters the logical walls around your attention. If you think of it that way, it’s not so far-fetched that the mind would just give up any semblance of staying present and just wander where it fancied. And into dark places.
The main thing I learnt from all this: never again concentrate exclusively on the actual thing I am worried about. Unless it’s “I’m on fire, how shall I put it out?”
It might be ridiculous (like the email) or very real (like AI). But if a worry recurs repeatedly at a wildly inappropriate time, then instead of trying to solve it, I will try and focus on the factors that have created my mood and see what I can do about them. It’s never easy, and it might take a little effort. Or training.
Whatever your recurrent storm clouds, I’ll bet your phone use is probably the low pressure cycle that allowed them to move in.
You know that feeling when you have a cold and everything feels a bit bleak? You find yourself obsessing over a work drama, an argument with a friend, or a crack in your marriage. You interrogate the problem for hours, because it is a real thing and it does need solving.
And then you remember: Oh, wait. I have a virus. Viruses make the whole world look grim. I’ll wait til the fever breaks, and then I’ll be able to think more constructively. I’ll worry about the problem then.
Heavy daily phone use is exactly like that. It is one big virus. Let the symptoms pass. And then look at your life afresh.
COMING UP: Everyone goes on about scrolling like it’s the only harmful thing we do with our phones. But we need to talk about how podcasts crowd out any silence, which means we never rest the mind. (Whatever resting the mind means.)
[Images by AI, words all human]